State Ends Bid To Disqualify Passaic Mayor

By MARIA NEWMAN

Published: March 16, 2002

PASSAIC, N.J., March 15—
Eight months after Samuel Rivera was sworn in as this city's mayor, the state attorney general's office gave up its effort today to remove him under a state law barring convicted criminals from holding public office.

A spokesman for Attorney General David Samson said his office had decided it could not gather enough evidence to prove that Mr. Rivera's admission in 1986 that he had helped cover up a murder when he was a police officer in Puerto Rico was sufficient to establish moral turpitude.

The effort to oust Mr. Rivera began under Mr. Samson's predecessor, John J. Farmer Jr., who maintained that Mr. Rivera's guilty plea in Puerto Rico put him in violation of New Jersey's Faulkner Act, which bans those convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude from holding public office.

Today, the attorney general's office notified local officials that it was abandoning the case because it did not have enough evidence to meet its burden of proof.

''They realized it wasn't enough to take me out of office,'' Mr. Rivera said at City Hall.

Mr. Rivera was a police officer in the Puerto Rican city of Caguas in 1980 when his partner shot and killed a drug dealer. Mr. Rivera later admitted that he had lied about the incident to protect his partner, who was acquitted of a murder charge.

Mr. Rivera accepted a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to failure to report a crime, in return for a sentence of probation.

Mr. Rivera, who served as a councilman in Passaic before running for mayor, said today that he had spent about $15,000 of his own money, and no city funds, to defend himself against the state's effort to oust him.

He said about the incident in Puerto Rico: ''I thought it was the best way to go, and I did it.''

Mayor Rivera still faces a misdemeanor charge stemming from a confrontation in January with Luis Santana, a former welterweight boxing champion, at the home of Mr. Santana's girlfriend. A judge reduced the charge of making terroristic threats to a disorderly-person charge of simple assault. Mr. Rivera faces up to six months in prison if convicted.